Bio
“I want to love and be loved, but I also want to be free. The tension between those two things has been the central question of my life,” says Julia Jacklin. It’s also the theme that underpins The Gem.
When Jacklin first moved to Melbourne from Sydney in 2017, she discovered a little bar on a back street in Collingwood, where bands pushed dining tables to the side and set up in a corner on the floor. She didn’t know anyone in town but knew she wanted to make the city her home, so she started hanging out there, forcing herself out of her comfort zone. The pub was named The Gem.
Fast forward eight years and Jacklin, with three celebrated solo records under her belt – Don’t Let The Kids Win (2016), Crushing (2019), and PRE PLEASURE (2022) – was looking to make a fourth. With time on her hands – she was out of contract with her record label, was searching for a manager – she decided to make the record at home in Melbourne, something she’d never done before.
She called up an old drinking buddy Robert Muinos, owner of Rat Shack studios, which is located above The Gem, and brought in friends Jacob Diamond (guitar), Mimi Gilbert (bass), and Jess Elwood (drums). Recording happened in close quarters, in converted hotel room accommodation upstairs at the pub. As it was a residential bar, they couldn’t record late into the night for fear of bothering the neighbour and sound bleed was a glorious constraint: foot traffic to the hairdresser and the tattoo parlour next door, loud music from the bands and the kitchen crew downstairs. If anyone needed a break from the sessions, they would venture downstairs and watch a band playing. Jacklin and the band even played two unannounced shows there to try out the songs before recording them.
They thought they’d smash out the record in two weeks, like she’d always done, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, it took nearly a year of tinkering to arrive at something Jacklin could get behind. “The Gem felt like a metaphor for the whole process, because a lot of it did feel like digging. I felt like I was doing it almost in the dark, just trusting I was going to find something.” It conjures images of excavation, of reinvention, of trusting your instincts and surrounding yourself with the people and things that make life worthwhile. It’s a soaring document of the songwriter’s journey back to herself.
The band got matching tattoos on the last day of The Gem sessions: a neat little circle to represent an opal – Jacklin’s favourite gemstone. Fittingly, one of the bartenders at The Gem did it. “It did really feel like we’d done something special together. And I think as a group, it felt important to commemorate it. I’m glad we all have these little gems on us.”